Pinterest announces new marketing features for online retailers

Today, Pinterest is introducing several new innovative merchant features to help retailers realize success on the platform, offering Pinners an even more expansive shopping experience.

Over 400 million Pinners come to the platform every month to discover new products and shop for brands that inspire them. With the new merchant features, including the Pinterest API for Shopping, product tagging for Pins, video in the catalog, and Shop tab on the Pinterest Business profile, Pinterest is making it easier for merchants to create engaging shopping experiences for the millions of Pinners on the platform.

At Pinterest, our goal is to turn inspiration into action, and our vision for shopping is to make it possible to buy anything Pinners are inspired by on the platform. In 2021, the number of Pinners engaging with shopping surfaces on Pinterest grew by over 215 percent, and 89 percent of weekly Pinners use Pinterest for inspiration in their path to purchase.

– Jeremy King, SVP of engineering at Pinterest.

“The new shopping features such as the API for Shopping allows brands and retailers to reach high-intent Pinners during the earliest stage of their shopping journey with the most updated catalog data.”

The number of merchant catalogs on Pinterest increased by 87 percent in Q1 2022 compared to the previous year.

The Pinterest API for Shopping

The vision for the Pinterest API for Shopping is to inspire commerce. Pinterest is extending its investments in shopping and measurement features, including catalog and product metadata management, to enable more efficient, improved data quality for merchant products. The Pinterest API for Shopping has led to a 97 percent accuracy level for price and availability data.

Pinterest’s new API has allowed Zazzle to efficiently and effectively promote hand-curated design collections via shopping campaigns. We’re seeing some promising early performance and are excited about the potential this has to continue showcasing our talented independent creator community.”

– Chris Lentini, chief marketing technology officer at Zazzle Inc.

Product tagging on Pins

Product tagging on Pins is our shopping feature that allows merchants to make their lifestyle Pins shoppable and helps Pinners to move easily from inspiration to action. With product tagging, merchants can add products from their catalog to their scene images. Pinners can easily browse for the exact items that they love from the inspiring imagery that they find. In our initial tests, we saw that Pinners showed 70 percent higher shopping intent on product Pins tagged in scene/brand images than standalone product Pins.

Video in catalog

Over the past year, we have seen promising results from video-like ad formats vs static formats (increased CTR by 158 percent, lowered CPC by 42 percent, lowered CPA by 58 percent) on the platform. Pinterest continues to invest in video with merchants, by enabling video assets in their product catalog to give Pinners a view of the product from multiple angles when making a purchase decision and driving conversions.

Shop tab on Business profiles

Pinterest continues to create new tools and resources to help merchants create a more inspiring shopfront and showcase products to shoppers when they’re looking to take action. With the new Shop tab on the Business profile, merchants can easily display shoppable products to browsing Pinners.

This new feature is a high-intent shopping surface, with 30 percent of Shopify merchants on Pinterest getting their first attributed checkout from their Shop tab. This new feature not only enables easier product group management directly on their Shop tab but also customizable product group cover images and descriptions, as well as an enhanced mobile interface for a seamless Pinner experience.

Pinterest is building a home for taste-driven shopping and is continually investing in new ways for shoppers to browse, discover and engage with brands.

This is the most recent announcement in Pinterest’s continued investment in shopping, following Pinterest’s acquisition of the AI Shopping platform, THE YES.

Inspired merchant badges

Inspired merchant badges have now expanded to the UK, Canada, Australia, and Germany. Merchant details allow merchants to add badges to their profiles to represent their values and communities, including Black-owned, sustainable and more. These details help brands to tell their story and to build a stronger connection between brands and Pinners, helping Pinners to shop their values.